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MoM March ‘09 – Best of America’s Test Kitchen: Lasagna with Meatballs

This post has been a looong time coming. Because at first I was waiting to get the pictures of my wife’s camera and on to her laptop so she can email them to me (it’s a Vista thing, don’t ask) but then her laptop ended up at the shop so we hooked her external hard drive to my computer so I could finally get the pictures but then it turned out they were gone. So I had to take some liberties with the pictures, I appreciate you coming with me on this one.

Now as this is a Cooks Illustrated recipe, I can’t give you the actual recipe. But the real jewel in this dish is the meatballs. At first I was wondering why put meatballs in lasagna, but then when I ate it and said “ooh meatball” every few minutes that became rather obvious. So you take your 85% lean ground beef, some bread crumbs, 2 eggs, some fresh basil and some Parmesan cheese and roll it up into little balls. I used SarVecchio which is a Wisconsin Parmesan cheese because Chef Torysays so. Nice video of him on the SarVecchio link too! So put them on a baking sheet and throw them in the oven and they will look like this..

uhm yeah. After that it’s your basic tomato sauce, using crushed tomatoes and garlic and olive oil. Actually this recipe is a little scant on the sauce, which is on purpose but it works. Boil your lasagna noodles and then do the assembly thing, noodles, sauce (and meatballs in the bottom layer), mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, noodles, rinse and repeat until it looks like this:

no, wait

The finished product looks like this:

So if you can still grab the magazine, please do so. It’s well worth your time. And if somebody wants to make the lasagna and send me some pictures, that would be great.